Fresh off a pair of first-place finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Donald Trump surged to an overwhelming double-digit victory Tuesday night in Nevada. Fueled by record-breaking turnout, the Republican front-runner ran roughshod over Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, solidifying a dominant poll position that may be impossible for his rivals to overcome as a series of Super Tuesday primary contests loom.

During his victory speech, Trump thumbed his nose at the unnamed pundits who predicted that he would only win among low-income white males without college degrees. “I love the poorly educated,” he told a crowd of supporters, ticking off a list of demographics he claimed to have won in Nevada, based on often inaccurate entrance polls: the college-educated, evangelicals and, most surprisingly, the Latino vote.

Trump’s victory seemed preordained, given his landslide wins in the previous primary states. But the record turnout in Nevada shocked everyone, with thousands more pre-registered caucus-goers than the number of Nevadans who voted in 2012. The state’s Republican party reportedly did not have enough ballots to count everyone who showed up to vote, and several caucus locations devolved into chaos trying to handle the crowds. If the high turnout in Nevada is indicative for the rest of the country, Republican leaders will have to rethink the assumption that Trump voters—a coalition including large numbers of previously unengaged working class voters—would fail to show up at the polls, dashing hopes that the Trump phenomenon might be a fad.

Those hopes now rest on who comes in second, and by how much they beat the third-place candidate. The stakes were higher for Cruz, suddenly on the defensive after Rubio rebounded from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire to edge him out for second place in South Carolina. Rubio, meanwhile, hoped to use Nevada to consolidate his role as the G.O.P.’s establishment-lane candidate, gearing up to be the sensible Republican alternative to Trump. (Update: 7:30 A.M.: the final vote tally put Rubio ahead by just two and a half points, leading Cruz 23.9 percent to 21.4 percent. Trump woke up Wednesday with a whopping 45.9 percent.) For either candidate to take on the front-runner, the other must concede defeat—to say nothing of John Kasich and Ben Carson, who also remain stubbornly in the race, holding on to enough votes to potentially stymie any concerted anti-Trump effort.

Still, even if all the stars line up in either Rubio or Cruz's favor, the electoral math could remain a stretch. “These geniuses. They don't understand that as people drop out, I'm going to get a lot of those votes also,” Trump himself pointed out during his victory speech last Saturday in South Carolina. “You don't just add them together.” Republican strategists have long argued that Trump, with his shockingly low favorability rating, has a natural ceiling to the breadth of his support. But pollsters and pundits have been wrong about the billionaire reality T.V. star since the day he announced his farcical candidacy last summer. Then, it seemed like one big joke. On Tuesday night, no one was laughing.